


Blood Feud

by prettysophist



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, POV Alternating, POV First Person, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 22:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettysophist/pseuds/prettysophist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hero’s story begins with his greatest moment of pain and vulnerability; a villain’s with her worst atrocity. As often as not, these moments are one and the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Feud

**Author's Note:**

> Written for tamingthemuse on LiveJournal. Prompt #491: Guerrilla Tactics.

A hero’s story begins with his greatest moment of pain and vulnerability; a villain’s with her worst atrocity. As often as not, these moments are one and the same. 

It avoids confusion, see? There’s never any question about which side is the right side. Us against Them, and it’s always Them who have it coming.

The villain kills the hero’s family, orphaning him as often as not. That makes the hero easy to sympathise with. It gives him a purpose beyond reproducing himself, and giving his serfs bad advice about planting beans in accordance with the phases of the moon.

Usually, the villain will use poison, an ambush, or a stab to the back. These kinds of guerrilla tactics indicate a certain sneaky underhandedness, and cleverly prevents any kind of long-winded explanation. It also shows a great deal of common sense, and a desire to avoid collateral damage, but we’re not supposed to think about that.

Show a united front, see? Can’t let Them see any chink in our defences.

* * *

Kamea watched gravely as her family celebrated around her. It wasn’t much fun sharing a name and a birthday with a war goddess. People always paid more attention to her than to you, even though you were there, and she obviously wasn’t.

There were good things about it too. Kamea was looking for one of them.

“Choc,” she muttered to herself. It wasn’t that she couldn’t say the whole word yet, it was just so much quicker the other way. And it made a good noise. Kamea liked noises.

“Choc, choc, choc.” She headed towards the side room as quickly as she could without people spotting her. Apart from her parents, that was.

“Where you going, baby girl?” her daddy asked, picking her up off the ground and holding her against his chest. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pressed her lips to his ear.

“Wants choc,” she confided.

“Well, let’s see if we can find some for you, shall we?” Still holding her, he headed towards the side room. Kamea didn’t complain, even though she could have got it on her own. She knew that he wanted to go away from the other grown-ups. He had said that he liked to be quiet some of the time, but Kamea knew he was lying, since he always seemed to take her with him. She talked more than all the rest of them put together, he said.

Putting her down on a chair, he headed toward the table that had food on it. He was only a little way towards it when there was a crash-noise outside, then angry-noise and surprise-noise at the same time. Crashing like that was usually followed by angry-noise, but this was a different sort of angry-noise. There were other noises too, like the noise Kamea had made when she fell off the roof one time. Pain-noise. Screaming.

“Stay here,” her daddy told her, heading towards the door. “You stay here no matter what, you understand?”

Kamea didn’t understand, but she nodded anyway.

There were more of the same noises from outside, then a sound like saucepans being banged together. Kamea waited for her mummy to tell them to stop that racket, but she couldn’t hear her mummy at all anymore. Her mummy had been one of the ones screaming earlier. Maybe she had fallen off something? Kamea moved toward the curtained doorway. 

The noises were louder from next to the doorway, because she was closer. She heard her daddy making angry-noise that was also sort of like a scream. He was saying her mummy’s name.

_“Willow!”_

Kamea was scared now. She wanted the noise to stop. She wanted her daddy to come back and tell her she could come out now. But her daddy was still yelling somewhere outside. He sounded very angry now.

Then he made a very strange noise that he shouldn’t be making. Only plugholes were supposed to make that noise, and only when you pulled the plug out. Kamea ran out into the room, heading straight for her daddy, who was lying on the ground.

He was all covered in the red stuff that grown-ups called “blood” if it was on them or “let-me-kiss-it-better” if it was on her. Since it was on her daddy it would be called blood. Kamea had never seen that much blood all at one time before. She started to cry.

“There she is,” a grown-up she didn’t know said. He grabbed her and picked her up. He didn’t have a face. Kamea cried harder. If she cried hard enough her daddy would get up off the floor and tell the faceless man to let her go and go away.

“Your name Kamea?” the faceless man asked, a bit of angry-noise in his voice. She didn’t like him. He was a bad man. He yelled at at her when she hadn’t done anything bad.

“Ye-es.” She cried even harder. Why wasn’t her daddy moving?

More faceless men came down from upstairs where they had been making yelling and crashing metal around. She didn’t like them either. They were all bad. Kamea hit the one who was holding her on the arm. 

Her daddy didn’t like it when she hit people, but her daddy was still lying on the floor, and even if he was angry at her it would be worth it if he got up. 

He didn’t.

“We got her,” the faceless man holding her told the other faceless men. “You’ve got rid of the rest of them?”

Kamea bit him on the arm. Her daddy didn’t like it when she bit people, either, but she really didn’t like this man. This man was a bad man, a really bad man. He was even badder than she had been when she lied to her mummy about that vase. She hadn’t meant to break it, but this man seemed to _like_ breaking things.

The faceless man didn’t like it when she bit, either. He made a sound part way between a c=scream and a yell, and then he dropped her on the floor. She kicked him. He made ouch-noise. She laughed. He was a bad man. He _deserved_ to hurt.

Another man came down the stairs, at the same time as the faceless man who had been holding her went to grab her again, making growl-noise like when she teased the cat too much. He looked even more angry than the cat. 

The man on the stairs yelled some more, and some of the other faceless men sliced at the one who was trying to grab her with an extra big knife. He fell on the ground next to her daddy, making the same gurgle-noise that her daddy had made earlier, and he got blood all over him. She laughed again. He was a bad man.

The man on the stairs looked at her with pride, the same way her daddy had looked at her when she first went all the way through the alphabet without making a mistake. She glared at him. He wasn’t her daddy, and he shouldn’t be making that face at her. He was a bad man too. They were all bad men.

She started to cry again.

* * *

I kneel on the ground before him, defeated. Fate and public opinion have made this moment inevitable. In the past, I have railed against the injustice of it, but in this moment all that I can feel is relief. 

Soon, it will all be over. Soon. 

My death will be clean, quick, and merciful. He is a hero, after all. He has a certain image to maintain.

I lift my head to meet intense blue eyes. I have always been told that you can glimpse a person’s soul through their eyes, but all I see in his is my own face reflected back at me. If I were more poetically inclined, I might read something into that.

As it is, I simply wonder who will perform this service for him. I have no son or daughter to avenge me, but his fervent quest for justice has left a bloody wake. 

His time will come, and soon. The cycle of destruction will continue.

The goddess whose name I bear will always see to that. War is her specialty.


End file.
